Events

Families, Histories, Novels

Peter Behrens is writing a sequence of novels about time, memory, and the ways the past shapes the present. All draw on materials from his own family’s history. Behrens’s first novel, The Law of Dreams (Steerforth Press, 2006), won the Governor General’s Literary Award, Canada's oldest and most prestigious book prize, and has been published in nine languages. The New York Times has called his second novel, The O’Briens (Pantheon, 2012), “a major achievement.” The third novel, Carry Me, will be published by Pantheon in February 2016 and is set in Berlin, Frankfurt, and West Texas during the disastrous epoch 1910–1938. Behrens’ fourth novel, a work-in-progress, “Bad Girl,” is about a young woman struggling with gender identity in Montreal in the 1960s, a period when Quebec society was struggling with identity issues of its own.

Fellows' Presentation

Fellows' Presentation

Peter Behrens with his wife, Basha Burwell, and their son, Henry Behrens. Photo by Jason Grow

In his three novels and two collections of short stories, Peter Behrens RI ’16 plumbs his family’s history in Canada, England, Germany, and Ireland. What drives him, however, is not what he knows about his family but what he doesn’t know: “The only way I know to learn what I don’t know is through fiction.”

Radcliffe fellow Michael Pollan is exploring a budding rebirth of psychedelic drugs, all but banned since the 1960s. “This has been a different kind of reporting for me. Interviewing people with cancer diagnoses—who are thinking about death—and talking about death with them,” Pollan said.

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